JOURNALISM: The Paris Review Interviews, Vol IVEdited by Philip Gourevitch Canongate, 480pp. £14.99
THERE IS something vaguely perverse about the literary interview as journalistic sub-genre. Its demands and impositions are deeply counter-instinctual; after all, it requests earnest and spontaneous insight, even profundity, of those whose broad public appeal is often based solely upon the laborious and expert craft of language. In its more successful moments, of which many are collected here, it performs a sort of alchemy, drawing unlikely riches from the innocuous collision of successful writer and politely deferential interviewer. But these bursts of candour are nearly always based on the relaxation of a tension and solemnity that otherwise forms a background hum to proceedings.
The Paris Reviewhas, since the periodical's inception under the legendary George Plimpton, always been deeply cognisant of this sense of discomfort lurking at the heart of the form. Appreciative of the fact that the real action occurs at the fringes of the conversation, where weighty discourse and big ideas collapse under a sudden burst of affability or eccentricity, every effort is made to meet the subject on his or her own terms. They are visited at home, or somewhere familiar; their interrogators are literate enthusiasts for their work, emboldened enough by curiosity to ask the question a given moment demands, but reverent enough to do it cautiously; in some cases, artists are even invited to participate in the edition of material and conduct interviews over several meetings, some spanning months. The result, more often than not, is an atmosphere calibrated to dispel the sort of apprehension that usually accompanies a tape recorder.
Unsurprisingly, though, the most resonant encounters here are those comparatively untroubled by editorial intervention, the raw transcripts of public events or excerpts from an afternoon’s rambling conversation. Maya Angelou, in particular, gives a magisterial performance before a packed auditorium. Fluently weaving autobiography and humour, she reduces hard-won wisdom to aphorism effortlessly: “Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it”. If her vision of the artist ascendant is intoxicating, no less so is a young William Styron’s endearingly dismal quest for a similarly epic register. At his interview’s conclusion, cowed and slightly frustrated, he remarks that “The purpose of a young writer is to write . . . He shouldn’t think after he’s written one book he’s God Almighty and air his immature opinions in pompous interviews”. Where Styron snatches a comedic victory from the jaws of embarrassment, the reverse is the case in Jack Kerouac’s predictably swirling and hallucinatory offering. Leaning, crutch-like, on self-parody and apocryphal reminiscence, he is, by 1968, reduced to an empty miming of the heroism of yesteryear, begging pills and booze from a depressingly compliant Ted Berrigan.
By contrast, Hermione Lee’s 1984 interview with Philip Roth suffers from a surfeit of edition. The obvious low-point of an otherwise sterling collection, Roth himself was permitted months to build his responses from a mass of transcripts. Though the result, indisputably, “provides an example, as well as an account, of Philip Roth’s presentation of himself”, it does so in a vacuum, over-indulging the writer’s career-long penchant for metafictional obfuscation. Somewhere beneath the smooth blocks of prose and the studied juggling of clauses lies a man, perhaps, who, like Orhan Pamuk, once had to walk around his apartment block twice in the morning to preserve the illusion of commuting to a distant office, or who, like Haruki Murakami, can boast of a daily routine that includes a 10-kilometre run and 1,500-metre swim, but we get no real sense of him.
That the anaesthetised flatness of the Roth interview should stand in such contrast to the rest of the collection is testament to the reliable strength of the Paris Reviewtemplate. While it offers a mass of anecdotes and fragmentary insights into the lives and personalities of some of the last century's most prominent writers, cause enough for praise, this collection's greatest attribute is its frequent ability to step beyond mere historical incidentals – such as knowing, say, that Ezra Pound's Cantos were suspected by the Nazis of being encrypted messages to the Allies – and make its sketches cohere in rounded, lifelike forms.
Conor Nagle is a UCD Ad Astra scholar and journalist
